PI Congress: Product development as we have known it, is dying…

I spent the beginning of this week in Berlin attending PI (Product Innovation) congress. Navigate to the following link to learn more. The event is a successor of PLM Innovation conference happened in the past in London, Munich and Atlanta. The even was organized by Market Key in partnership with CIMdata. This year event was expanded to cover product design in addition to PLM related topics. The event is vendor neutral. With about 300 guests and representation of many CAD and PLM vendors, it provided a good place to discuss and get updated about what happens in product development world (PLM included). The primary focus of the event was clearly about customer presentations. Even so, PI congress was blessed by several well-known keynote speakers – Steve Wozniak, Prof. Martin Eigner and few others. In addition to that, exhibition provided a good opportunity to see demos and speak to vendors. Below some of my thoughts as an outcome of two event days.

PLM – changes are coming

I must credit Peter Bilello of CIMdata for a truly provoking title of this blog post. I took it from his presentation: The future of PLM – enabling radical collaboration. We are facing changes driven by two major factors – new social-savy workforce and “maker” movements. I specially liked the following slide from Peter’s presentation – Radically connected… Kids.

We have new reality and new people. These people will influence future priorities of manufacturing companies and will drive industry changes as individuals. We can debate timing of when it will happen, but this is more tactical. Strategically, new social workforce will drive future changes in the industry.

Another interesting aspect of product development changes is related to new technologies. They are going to impact product design as it is today. Key factors here are connectivity, social networking and big data. All together they are changing the way product designed and manufactured. The transformation comes from the connection these technologies are establishing between development processes and business goals.

Large successful mono-PLM projects

A significant part of PI Congress was dedicated to customer presentations. This is one of the sweet spots of this conference. To listen to customers and how they implement existing product and technologies is the main reason to come. This year, PI Congress introduced few remarkable presentations from The Boeing Company, GETRAG, Dana Holding, Andritz, Kennametal, Autoliv and few others. I found these presentations very interesting and educational. It shows that value of PLM is recognizable by companies and organizations are strategically focused on driving more PLM implementations to improve their development processes.

The downside experience of these implementations (I call them “mono-PLM”) is related to effort and cost. Most of them are multi-year and focusing on how to replace a zillion of legacy application with a single PLM platform like it was presented on a picture above. All these implementations are good and provide value to companies. However, some of these companies are not comfortable even to speak about the cost of these implementations. In my view, this is an indication of potential cost/value ratio problem.

Interdisciplinary integrated PLM

The complexity of PLM implementation is growing. Integration theme was dominant in most of the presentations done by customers, analysts and industry experts. Here are few examples showing the importance of information assets integration during PLM implementation.

Speaking more, Peter Bilello of CIMdata discussed the convergence of Configuration Management, PLM and System Engineering as the only way to solve the problem of complexity.

What is my conclusion? I want to get back to my conclusion about PLM perfect storm 2012 one year ago. In my view, we will see more changes and disruption in coming years. Three main driving factors – cost of implementations, complexity of product development and consumerization of IT. All together, they will provide a perfect eco-system to innovate. My recommendation to customers these days is not to make 5 years commitments. To vendors – don’t trust status quo. Your potential competitors are not reading emails and still working from a garage space. Just my thoughts…

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